The View From The Croft

What with the Coronation, there will be three Holiday Mondays next May. As if anyone will still have a job by then.

This will be a double Coronation, since there is a Queen Consort. No one seems to find it odd that that is what the former Mrs Parker-Bowles is, and will therefore be crowned as. When she became the Duchess of Cornwall, then the Church of England's Service of Prayer and Dedication after a civil marriage was rendered into the Royal Family's preferred Cranmerian English especially for the occasion.

The dear old C of E was set up to give the Royals any marital arrangements that they might have happened to desire, and it continues to do so, even to that extent. Therefore, an Archbishop of Canterbury will perform a same-sex marriage in this generation, because a Royal will want one. He or she will probably even do it in the cadences of the Book of Common Prayer.

Despite being 65, it is possible that Steve Croft is positioning himself. I was going to write that he had moved a very long way since I had known him, but then again, the dispute between the rising Evangelicals and the rest in the Church of England, the Methodist Church and the URC was always a matter of musical taste, of guitars versus organs. It was always going to end in same-sex marriage with worship songs rather than with Victorian Sunday school hymns. And here we are.

The Established status of the Church of England while not performing same-sex marriages has been a running sore for nearly a decade. The change in the Church of Scotland had already made the position untenable, and the discussion around the Coronation, when much of the media would have exploded that the event was being conducted by so incomprehensibly reactionary an organisation, would have been the breaking point. Again, then, here we are.